Run to Win

If all is going according to plan, then I am on my way down to Atlanta right now for the RRCA Coaching Clinic and for the ING Georgia Marathon. I have a review scheduled to appear on the site tomorrow morning thanks to a couple of excellent readers from my newsletter, and if I can get some online access over the weekend then I’ll provide some thoughts on the race after I get done running. If not, then you’ll have to wait until I get home!

I am expecting good things out of the marathon this weekend. Based on the reviews that I read last year, everybody really liked the race except for a few major problems with it, such as not providing enough water. The race directors seem to have learned from their mistakes based on their preparations, so I am expecting things to go pretty well as long as they get the route cleaned up from the recent tornado that attacked Atlanta.

If you are going to be in the area, then keep an eye out for me at the expo on Friday night. The expo is free of charge both Friday and Saturday, although it has been moved to the Georgia Dome due to the storm damage downtown. If you are at the race as either a runner or a spectator, then feel free to come up and say hi if you spot me. I will be wearing bib #129 and expect to be running at a pretty even 6:50-6:52 pace throughout the entire race.

My goals for this marathon are pretty simple; it’s going to be a long tempo run. The idea is to get in 28-30 good miles, with 26 of them taking me to the finish line in about 3 hours. I want to be able to recover quickly from the race so that I can get back to my normal training next week as I prepare for my goal marathon on May 4^th in Rhode Island.

If you are running and want to run a sub-3 hour race, then I’m more than happy to provide the pace for you. I’ll warn you that I sometimes don’t shut up when I’m running, especially when running marathons, so I might talk your ear off. Of course, that could provide you with the motivation to stay ahead of me and meet your goals, since you’ll hear me coming up behind you!

The race is Sunday morning at 7:00 EDT, and if you are interested in such things you can track my progress at this web page once the race begins:
http://www.inggeorgiamarathon.com/Race_Info/Race_Day_Results_and_Tracking.htm

You can find out more information about the race at their website:
http://www.inggeorgiamarathon.com/

Tonight led to an interesting run, as evidenced in the photo the right. I considered postponing my run until late tonight so that I could see the eclipse while I was running, but decided that it wasn’t worth staying up that late. I knew that the eclipse would begin around the time that I finished running and that I’d be able to enjoy it from home.

The run began great. Despite having not charged the batteries in my headlamp, I had no trouble seeing as there were very little clouds in the air and the moon was quite bright. I thought that the moon looked a little funky, so I knew the eclipse wasn’t too far away. The next time that I glanced up, though, it had begun!

By the time that I got home, it was pretty dark. I ran inside, collected my camera and my wife, and you can see from the photo how long I had until the total eclipse.

I thought that the eclipse would start at 10:00 and be total at around 10:30. The photo was taken at about 9:30. I think that it was a good thing that I didn’t wait to run.

I took a dozen pictures or so, playing with different exposures. I don’t have a remote shutter for my camera, though, so it is impossible to avoid a little camera shake at night. The photo above is at the maximum resolution. I just cropped it into a square.

If you would like to download my original images, then you can do so by clicking on the picture. The pictures are compressed into a ZIP archive that is about 4MB in size. Most of them aren’t any good, but they are interesting to look through. This photo was #26.

I wore my new Garmin ForeRunner 305 to the indoor track today so that I could make use of the heart rate monitor. That aspect of my workout was a failure, but I learned quite a few things about my new GPS watch and running on an indoor track.

When I got home, I was amazed to discover that the GPS worked inside!

Not particularly well, since it thinks that I was running around the infield at an average pace of 42 minutes per mile instead of 4 minutes per mile, and it thinks that I ran through the walls a few times, but the map was great:

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I got lost in the middle of a lake today while I was out running. (If you have never done it before, then be sure to read the FAQ about Lake Running first!) You would think that it would be pretty difficult to get lost in the middle of a lake. After all, there are no hills you can see for miles because everything is exactly level, and there are even a few islands to use as landmarks that you can run around.

Photo by ezioman
Yet there I was, having done a loop and on my way back, trying to figure out exactly where it was that I had come onto the lake. I could have easily backtracked and found where my footprints in the snow were, but there’s the possibility that snowmobiles had obliterated some and besides, where’s the fun in that?

I have a very good sense of direction, so I pointed myself towards where I wanted to go and it wound up being right.

After a few steps, though, I decided to give the map functionality on my new watch a try. It is a Garmin ForeRunner 305. I haven’t had it long, so I don’t know all of the cool things you can do with it yet. I mostly use it for mapping my runs after the fact.

It turns out that I was going in the right direction and would soon have gotten to a spot of open water that I would have remembered running around on the ice. It makes me very comfortable knowing that the map was there, though, because now I can run trails wherever I want and at least have an idea of what direction I need to go to get home. Once I was back on the path I wanted to take, it even started to warn me about 15-30 feet before every turn that a turn was coming. That was pretty neat, but also a little annoying.

Photo #59 by Don Penta
The run itself was a lot of fun. I ran 15 miles on snowmobile trails, with about a third of that on the surface of the lake. Anytime a snowmobile came near me I had to jump off to the side, where I would sink into knee deep snow. I also got some strange looks when they got close enough to realize I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Hey, it was hot out! It was at least 35 degrees.

Speaking of running without a shirt, the pictures for last week’s Resolution Run are now available. By the time it started snowing during that run, I had stripped down to just my singlet. You can see all of the pictures from the run (the photo to the left is cropped from #59) over at the Maine Running Photos website.

2007 has come and gone, and 2008 is about to start.

This year, I ran just shy of 1900 miles, which is half again what I ran last year. I attribute that to my lack of injuries this year, with a short stint of achilles tendonitis that I managed to nip in the bud. I did not realize that I was well on pace for a 2000 mile year until right before I took 3 weeks off in November, which killed that goal.

My official total came to 1894.5 miles, but I decided to take today off from running so I will stay a little short of the 1900 mark. Next year I expect to run between 2300 and 2500 miles, helped by the number of trail miles that I plan on running to help hold off injuries.
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Enjoy some time with your family this holiday season; it is what I am doing!

Merry Christmas!

I felt pretty strong in the last few hundred yards. I waved for the crowd, got them pumped up when my name was announced over the intercom, and hammed it up as I sprinted in. And by sprinting in, I mean picking up the pace a little bit over what I had been running. It is an uphill finish, after all.

The Finish Line

After I passed the bulldog mascot and got into the finisher’s chute, I hung out near the finish line area to congratulate all of the runners that came in after me that I had passed over the last few miles. I was waiting for the marine and for Paul to finish running so that I could chat with them.

A Navy runner finished and had a little trouble after passing over the line, so a couple of marines put his arms over their shoulders and walked him over the medical tent. He was in heaven. “First I run a marathon,” he said, “and then I get escorted around by a couple of lovely ladies.” They just smiled and kept leading him away.
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I was about 4 people away from the starting line when the gun went off.

It took all of about 1 second for me to cross over the line. My goal was to run between 2:40:00 and 2:45:00, and I was hoping to be at 2:45:00 pace halfway through and then run negative splits. Any sort of a PR would make my slowest goal, so I needed to run faster than 2:51:37 at the very worst.

Mile 1: 7:37 / 7:37 (+1:19)
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